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Want to build yourself a landing site that gets a good quality score? Try using Build A Niche Store as as your content management system and see how much Google love you get. I recently started another site strictly for sending Adwords traffic to using the BANS script and for me, it’s working like a charm, but this apparent love for BANS from Google on the advertising side points out a bit of their truly schizophrenic nature in their artificially intelligent mind.

I say Google has this schizophrenic nature because on the one hand they seem to have no problem giving my landing pages for a diet product built on a BANS template a good quality score as seen from the above pic, but on the other hand they don’t seem to like BANS when it comes to organic rankings. While I still do have several BANS sites ranked and indexed by Google, three of my BANS sites have been completely removed from their index.

One of those sites was the air purifier auctions site I used as an example for my Build A Niche Store Tutorial series and another is a drums and percussion site that I had been working on and the third will remain nameless. These two cases are bizarre because while both of these sites could be better, they feature content and product descriptions on most pages and in the case of the air purifiers site, there are more content pages than there are auction pages and there is zero advertising on that site. I can’t for the life of me figure out why that site would have been de-indexed, unless the air purifier company EcoQuest International complained to Google because I was outranking them for some of their own product keywords.

In the case of the BANS websites for organic results I’m screaming at Google asking, “What do you want from me?” but in the case of my diet product site when it comes to Adwords advertising, I’m saying “Thanks!” to Google. Does it make any sense that Google would say, “No we don’t want your BANS site in our index, but if you’d like to advertise and spend some money with us, we’ll certainly let you do that”? Well, actually that does make a lot of sense.

Honestly, I just wish Google would get their act together and show a little more consistency. I will never think it’s a good thing to let Google have as much power as they do.

This is of course a common problem and one that causes many people a lot of frustration.

One thing that you say though that I can quibble with is in your last paragraph. You mention you do not think it is good to let Google have as much power as they do. That seems curious as no one let them have this power – they claimed it. First by building a good search engine, then by making it better, than by monetizing their system in way that no one has yet to come close to on the web. Part of Google’s frenetic nature in dealing with affiliate sites is in part to keep the white noise to a minimum. You work hard to build useful pages but, for the most part, BANS is full of lots of thin sites – as is the affiliate website genre.

Not only is the lower end of thin sites essentially webspam, it seriously taxes Google’s ability to keep its results as useful as possible (information searches, that is).

It makes it easier for Google to deal with this by assuming most affiliate sites are worthless. You are not trying just to rank, but rise above a higher bar than you would if you did not have an affiliate site. What do you think would happen if you were to build you site, which you say has a lot of information, if you were not on BANS and trying to get it to simply rank for the terms you go after? Provided you are doing nothing Google considers otherwise shady (selling links, using redirects, etc.), it would be unlikely that any of your sites would get banned from the index.

As I said, it is frustrating, but it is what it is. One way (Mike mentions this in his comment), in my mind, to not cede so much control to Google is to not use BANS – you will not be associated with a stable of bad neighbors you share in your BANS family. I would say you are mainly suffering guilt by association.

Thanks for your comments. Yes, I know that Google claimed that power and they do have quite a job on their hands making sure their index isn’t full of junk. However, I’ve done quite well with BANS and it seems that people such as myself are being punished for the spam of others.

I have changed my tune on BANS to just building a few quality sites instead of trying to build an empire. I agree that raising the bar higher is the better way to go.

Recently I have been advocating about not worrying about Google, unless one is trying SEO for niche sites. But getting traffic to a site to convert and playing the Google game at the same time is an oil and water game. In the short term and the long-term it is better to concentrate on getting traffic outside of organic search engines. Do what it takes. And once a site is profitable, you can release the throttle a bit and search engines will come automatically as they recognize your traffic.

LOL, what else is new, Google always does what suits them! My BANS are floating in and out, 1 sits on page on for KW, and others are there one day and out the next, all have tons of written original content, WTF??? Who knows!

Alan, You may want to revisit the actual footprint you are laying out. Especially the wording “Time left:”

I am seeing a trend of others site being filtered out with this wording. There are WAY too many spam BANS sites out there that G is filtering them on a footprint of sorts. The answer lies in a common attribute that MOST Bans sites are using. Content laden or not. There are far too many sites that G is hand reviewing so you might want to examine your setup. Also you might want to examine your third site to see if it carries the same attributes as the recently remove sites you listed.

None if this is scientific, but I love to test and these are early results I am seeing.

This is a great idea. I have used BANS as a way to put quick content on my site before I am ready to manually build the site. Google liked the content and indexed the site based solely on the basic BANS install.

Officially, Google states that there is no benefit to advertisers when it comes to fairness in their operations. However, contact with Google Adwords professionals who have been in business for many years has shown me that paying the piper, if even to a small degree, will get you overlooked in some decisions.

You know, I think the bottom line is that Google’s search engine model is always in constant change. I’d bet if you ask the Google powers that be if they’re satisifed with the ways things are, you’d get a resounding ‘no.’

Well, they probably wouldn’t actually say that publicly, but I believe they are truly striving to offer the best quality search results possible. That’s why their algorithm is in a constant state of change. No one wants to receive a crap porn site or something when they’re seeking quality information. At one time it was pretty much hit or miss.

For those of you that were online back in the 80s, it was a very different Internet…and not in a good way.

I’m not trying to suckup, but we do owe the big G much. That’s why they’re as big as they are. Although I don’t see it happening anytime soon (or ever), if a different, better method of searching came along, it would climb to the top of the heap very quickly.

Also, if you have quality content that people link to, with regular updates, you will get traffic, well USUALLY. Having said that though, it does seem as though Google does have a special hardon for BANS sites sometimes, but I believe that too will be worked out. When they (Google) figures out that a BANS site doesn’t necessarily mean a crap affiliate site, the world will turn with a little less friction.

Obviously the days of putting up a site of affiliate links and hoping for traffic is long gone…and that’s a good thing.

I have come to the painful realization that it is time to move away from the BANS platform. I have several sites with content/linkbuilding done. One of them I moved to SBI platform. It had done well for awhile, ranked well with Google and then dissappeared into oblivion. Within weeks of moving it to SBI it started to rank well again. I think search engines don’t like BANS template.

Add to that that BANS no longer seems to be supported. I am thinking that the next move is to move content to WordPress with eBay or Popshops plugins for products.